Dell Latitude D820 “Memory Parity” error

For a few years, I’ve had a Dell Latitude D820 that has been extremely finicky. The main thing would be installing an OS, after the computer would reboot from the initial install and go into Finalizing the install, I’d get a BSOD saying “NMI: Memory Parity Error”. I’d swapped the memory (all of it), the HD, and everything else that made any sense. Finally, I came across a page online1 that someone had posted saying it seemed to be a wireless issue. This is something I hadn’t tested, and after disabling the wireless in the bios, I was able to successfully install Windows on the machine, and it worked perfectly (though, obviously without wireless).

It seems there must have been a batch of the Broadcom wireless cards that would go bad after a while, and would cause BSODs randomly. Anyway, I purchased an Intel 4965AGN off ebay for $12, and a week later installed it, and the computer has had wireless on, and working flawlessly since.

I don’t think this is a common issue, but incase you have a D820 that’s suddenly giving “Parity Errors”, you might try disabling the wireless in the bios and see if that fixes it. If so, replace, and rejoice!